Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday August 25, 2014 @11:40AM
from the oh-watching-the-places-you'll-go dept.

cold fjord writes with this story about the proliferation of companies willing to sell tracking information and systems. Makers of surveillance systems are offering governments across the world the ability to track the movements of almost anybody who carries a cellphone, whether they are blocks away or on another continent. The technology works by exploiting an essential fact of all cellular networks: They must keep detailed, up-to-the-minute records on the locations of their customers to deliver calls and other services to them. Surveillance systems are secretly collecting these records to map people's travels over days, weeks or longer ... It is unclear which governments have acquired these tracking systems, but one industry official ... said that dozens of countries have bought or leased such technology in recent years. This rapid spread underscores how the burgeoning, multibillion-dollar surveillance industry makes advanced spying technology available worldwide. "Any tin-pot dictator with enough money to buy the system could spy on people anywhere in the world," said Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International.

actually, when you buy in bulk TBs are cheap, and mem prices drop, especially when you have 100 GB/s pipes

Disks may be relatively cheap especially in OEM quantities, however when the requirement is for multi petabytes then you cannot think in terms of a collection of single disks even in a RAID array you have to consider a Storage Area Network and the infrastructure to manage, backup and even do a recovery. When you start adding up the costs this does not come cheap.

Yes governments, especially those in first world countries can build up the necessary infrastructure to capture information and it comes out of t

This is good technology, but not as good technology as that thing where people call the bad guy and have to stay on the phone with him for 20 seconds in order to trace the call. If I can offer one recommendation: they should work on making that like 19 seconds. Because 90% of the time the bad guy knows it takes 20 seconds, and has a stopwatch by the phone, and hangs up at like 19 seconds, just to toy with the good guy.

Because 90% of the time the bad guy knows it takes 20 seconds, and has a stopwatch by the phone, and hangs up at like 19 seconds, just to toy with the good guy.

I'm pretty sure that the U.S. Government doesn't need a stopwatch to know when 20 seconds are up. I'm also pretty sure that toying with Edward Snowden isn't as much fun as it may seem. But then again, the U.S. Government is rather psychotic nowadays.

Because 90% of the time the bad guy knows it takes 20 seconds, and has a stopwatch by the phone, and hangs up at like 19 seconds, just to toy with the good guy.

Which is why, back in 2007, the NSA infiltrated stopwatch manufacturers and altered their timing mechanisms so they run slow - when a stopwatch says 19 seconds, in truth it's been a bit over 20 seconds. So now when the bad guy thinks he's outsmarted the beautiful police detective, she's had time to set up that GUI in Visual Basic and knows exactly where he is.

Don't believe me? Just look at the number of world records that have fallen during the last few Olympic Games.

If you remember a little device from 2007 called iPhone - it introduced a "novel" idea: Let's find out where we are based on the nearby cell towers - we get a list of nearby cell towers and distance from them (can be computed: power & ping delay) and we ask a central data base where the tower location is and we triangulate based on that.

The Cell ID location databases are still active and public (and used for AGPS [wikipedia.org] in the newer iPhones and other devices). And even if you cannot access it, by just driving around with a GPS-enabled device and some logging software you can build your own map.

And the cell locations are NOT changing frequently. It costs A LOT to have a tower in place: the only things that are changing once a tower is in place is the antennas (orientation and type/spread) and back-end network hardware (upgrades from 2G cards to 3G to 4G...)

If you remember a little device from 2007 called iPhone - it introduced a "novel" idea: Let's find out where we are based on the nearby cell towers

Minor correction. This technique was not introduced by the iPhone. Google Maps was doing this on Nokia/SonyEricsson J2ME candybar phones for years beforehand. When Apple licensed Google Maps they got access to the same technology. As far as I know Google invented this, although it's one of those ideas that's obvious enough to anyone who explores the problem that

Shoot...the telecom manufacturer I worked for demonstrated this back in the early 90s. Didn't need any logic in phone -- just service provider logic correlating relative powers reported by multiple cell sites.

rare to have the data that maps Cell ID's to locations for every cell tower in a country

I'd expect that data to be readily available at some point in the cellular system. Otherwise, how would they route an incoming call to a cell phone to the proper tower? As you move, your phone continuously 'checks in' with the nearest towers. Depending on the definition of 'where cell phone users go around the globe', that will probably satisfy most nosey governments.

If they need better resolution, they could craft a special SMS message tha would not cause your phone to display any activity, but would provide an acknowledgement with triangulation data to the message originator.

As far as knowing where the cell towers are; in the USA that's a matter of public record [fcc.gov].

You can "ping" a device in th GSM network and that device will return a reply containing the current Cell ID and distance from the tower. And with some devices you can "ask" them to seek a different cell - and it will return that as the reply. The owner of the phone only sees the cell signal bar fluctuating.

Also over the course of a phone conversation, both devices will tell the other one the Cell ID at the beginning of the call and at every hand-over between cells.

but the tracking doesn't really work for "anyone". rather it works for people who are using an operator from your country(or if you can snoop on the data).

that doesn't mean that anyone could buy just some sw and track anyone, it just means usa can track all verizon users and finland could track all finnish people moving all over the globe(provided they keep their finnish sim in their phone and the

Well...As long as you can push a SIM-App to that Phone's SIM card, that program can periodically send updates with the current location (Network ID, Cell ID, power) to another network-connected device without the owner ever knowing. It's invisible even to the phone OS, as everything happens inside the SIM and radio module)

And all newer SIM cards (all that have a SIM Application menu, 2001 or newer) can do this, and your network operator (or anyone having the proper network access) can push something OTA to

The surprising part (to some people) is not that the provider knows where you are but that anyone who knows SS7 can submit query like "where is 1-123-456-7890?" to the cell network and the provider will tell them.

The "surprise" is that this data is available to seemingly unrelated parties who aren't even state actors. The only data sufficiently protected by the phone system is payment data, because that's what the operators, and by extension the designers of the system, care about.

Paging protocols were never that efficient though. I did work at a company that had been a paging service company previously and had migrated into the software side, and apparently it was possible to set up the network to send-out pages several times since there was no feedback that a page was received, and pages weren't always queued up and sent as quickly as one would normally like, at least not quickly enough to allow for near-real-time use like you describe.

Dont unpack and test your new phone near your everyday phone. If it is your home, hotel room or work, every phone that is was normally in the area is now of interest due to that one time test activation. Numbers called, callers and voice prints will find that new interesting phone later and allow a gov/mil to work back.
If that does not work, just map an area where tow phones walk towards each other and turn/power off and turn on again walking away from each other.
Any phone is a risk.

There are no such thing as privacy as long as you have a cell phone, use a credit card, drive a car with a license plate, anything related to a internet connection, your face visible in public places for cameras to track.Hardly a surprise anymore.

The way I use my smart phone like means the opposite. The phone can take messages, hence using it in burst seems the most convenient way to use it. Left in one room of the house and only picking it up to check for messages and making a burst of calls, as I wander around and then putting it back down. Sometimes taking it with me and sometimes not but definitely not always taking it with me. So consider that phone in your pocket a stranger and don't expose anything to it you wouldn't expose to a stranger.

The UK made sure a kind of early tracking tech was ready for cell phones as a standard due to experiences in Ireland back in the day. Not unexpected news back then, a strange story to make Slashdot in 2014.

"Any tin-pot dictator with enough money to buy the system could spy on people anywhere in the world," said Eric King

Any tin-pot dictator or any person with enough money.
Governments love that surveillance technology is getting cheaper and cheaper. What they fail to understand is the same technologies are getting cheaper and cheaper for *everyone*. Mobile phone videos of police, customer service call recordings, etc are already starting to make a difference. There isn't much we can do to stop government surveillance, the best we can hope for is being able to surveil back at them.

There isn't much we can do to stop government surveillance, the best we can hope for is being able to surveil back at them.

After 9/11, State/local governments began to understand that police communications were a hodge podge of frequencies.Since then, there's been a slow, but concerted, push to move all State/local police to a more coherent system.

Unfortunately, many police forces are upgrading to encrypted systems at the same time.We will never really be able to surveil "them" to the same extent as they can surveil us, if for no other reason than they'll make it illegal.

Also even if your phone cant get a good gps, it might get a location for other phones that can, in the area on the same networks.
Global Wi-Fi, cell-id location databases, ambient signals, visitors use gets a gov/mil some nice indoor positioning.

Why is this groundbreaking - when the government can just force the cell phone company to hand over this information at will? And it's free that way. I found it amusing during the Aaron Hernandez case, when they came up with detailed information of his whereabouts - to the second - after the fact that he was suspected of murdering someone.

Here is a website where you can see how your android phone tracks your movement. You have to be logged in, which means it's about as private as a gmail account, however private that is. Tracked me in Europe last month, where I only used the wifi and GPS (but drew point-to-point crow flies lines, as compared to USA highway lines) https://maps.google.com/locati... [google.com]

That eeevil corporations and government can track my phone is of course, no surprise. However, how easy would it be to fool such systems, and make them think they're tracking me, when in fact they are tracking someone else, I wonder?

If you want to be able to talk to the world, expect the world know where you are so the world can listen.
Of course the cell phone provider knows where you are; they have to literally beam a signal to you.
So, no duh they know where you are, they have to.

I don't think you get it. This has nothing to do with your phone. It's the phone network that keeps track of where you are. Your phone does not need GPS. It just needs to be on. Now it seems that other people, besides your network operator, are able to query the network for your location by just knowing your phone number. And those people are not necessarily your friends.

It swings both ways. If they want to track my every move via a cell phone then I'll use it as an alibi when I go out and commit crime then tell them I was home the whole time because I purposely left my phone on the kitchen counter.

Nice idea, but you also have to deal with license plate recognition, EZ-Pass, tire RFID, shoe RFID, facial recognition, and the like.